{"id":5237,"date":"2026-06-11T20:25:22","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T18:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/octavekaralievitch.com\/?p=5237"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T11:23:09","slug":"the-truth-about-meisner-history-our-interview-with-jim-jarrett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/octavekaralievitch.com\/en\/the-truth-about-meisner-history-our-interview-with-jim-jarrett\/","title":{"rendered":"The truth about Meisner history: our interview with Jim Jarrett"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jim Jarrett describes himself as Sanford Meisner&#x27;s last teaching prot\u00e9g\u00e9. In this long-form interview, conducted by Octave Karalievitch, he talks about what he learned directly from Meisner at the end of Meisner&#x27;s life, why the technique has been diluted as it spread, which schools and teachers he considers legitimate, and what the work actually does to an actor. Full cleaned transcript below the video.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\" style=\"position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;\"><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2tZM_flwHLo\" style=\"position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer;autoplay;clipboard-write;encrypted-media;gyroscope;picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen title=\"The truth about Meisner history: our interview with Jim Jarrett\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<h2>In short<\/h2>\n<p>Jim Jarrett studied with Sanford Meisner from 1987 to 1991, near the end of Meisner&#x27;s life, and was mentored not only as a student but as someone meant to carry on the teaching. He runs the Meisner Technique Studio in San Francisco. His central argument is that authentic Meisner transmission is rare: many well-intentioned teachers learned the technique secondhand, and it has shifted in the process. This is one of the few first-hand accounts of Meisner&#x27;s late teaching, and it also maps the contested landscape of who teaches the technique today and on what basis, including Bill Alderson, Bob Carnegie and Playhouse West, Larry Silverberg, Nick Moseley, Dennis Longwell, James Carville, the Sanford Meisner Center, and the Meisner estate&#x27;s online teaching certificates.<\/p>\n<p>The transcript below has been cleaned for readability. The words are Jim Jarrett&#x27;s and Octave Karalievitch&#x27;s.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>&quot;I have people who have studied Meisner, and you&#x27;ll hear them go, &#x27;Yeah, I tried Meisner, it didn&#x27;t work for me,&#x27; and I&#x27;m always like, oh my God. It is all about authenticity. It&#x27;s all about falling into the most free, liberated version of you. I know this is going to put off some people. I tried to be as honest and diplomatic as possible, as respectful as possible.&quot;<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h2>The Meisner Technique Studio (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">0:38<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Sure. I&#x27;m here in San Francisco. As beautiful as your city is, that&#x27;s how blessed I am. I feel like we&#x27;re in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet. It&#x27;s called the Meisner Technique Studio and it&#x27;s located in the heart of San Francisco. It&#x27;s on our website, and it&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve been saying ever since I&#x27;ve been teaching, which is now over 30 years: pure, legitimate, authentic. Those aren&#x27;t egocentric words I throw around casually or irresponsibly. That was the last conversation I had with Sandy shortly before he passed. I promised him that once I established my career, first and foremost as an actor, I would then establish a school in his name, and I would present his teachings as pure, legitimate, and authentic as possible. So that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m dedicated to.<\/p>\n<p>People are teaching Meisner all over the world, and it&#x27;s a wonderful thing for so many reasons. But like anything, it starts to get diluted. I recently interviewed somebody who got introduced to Meisner at a yoga class. Sandy&#x27;s genius is out there, and a lot of well-intentioned people are teaching it, who studied with somebody who studied with somebody, and it just starts to get shifted, changed.<\/p>\n<p>My teacher was Sanford Meisner. Through the grace of God, my teacher was Sandy, and not only as a student but mentored to carry on his teaching legacy. That I&#x27;m his last teaching prot\u00e9g\u00e9 does not make me anointed or special. I just was in the right place at the right time, and that was 34 years ago. I was mentored not only as a student but then as someone to teach this information. That&#x27;s what the school is dedicated to. We take our students on the exact same journey, brick by brick, step by step, class by class, session by session, from beginning to end of the full training.<\/p>\n<h2>Length of the curriculum (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=170\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2:50<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> So the full training means you&#x27;re doing the traditional two years, when someone comes into your school?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> That is correct. It&#x27;s misleading, it&#x27;s really not two years, but you hear that all the time. That does include the breaks, and the breaks were an important part of the training. Sandy stressed that. First of all, everyone&#x27;s working really hard. This is world-class training, a huge demand of time and energy: class twice a week plus all the practice time outside of class. That&#x27;s why the breaks are important. It&#x27;s supposed to be taught in a total of at least six three-month sessions. That&#x27;s how Sandy did it. We have summer breaks, we have a holiday break in December, just as Sandy did, and we get right back at it come September, and it cycles again.<\/p>\n<h2>Rehearsing outside of class, and the requirements to get accepted (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=225\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">3:45<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> If someone wants to get into your annual training, do you have any requirements in terms of previous training? And especially, are you going to ask them to rehearse outside the class? Because some schools have different opinions on whether students should rehearse the repetition exercise outside of class, or only when the teacher is around.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> You mean you&#x27;ve heard of people who don&#x27;t want them practising the repetition outside of class? Oh my gosh, no. Sandy would go crazy at that. Of course you&#x27;re supposed to be practising constantly.<\/p>\n<p>As for the requirements: just like Sandy, there&#x27;s no audition for acceptance. Let&#x27;s be very clear. When I came to Sandy, it was near the end of his life. He was 84 when I first started studying with him. I wasn&#x27;t a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse, I wasn&#x27;t an 18-year-old kid who didn&#x27;t get Sandy until the second year of a performing arts school with music and dance and movement. I was in Sanford Meisner&#x27;s professional private class, with Sandy from that first class to the very last. There was no other curriculum. It was Sandy&#x27;s class twice a week, plus the practice time. The practice times are the key. Sandy wanted us practising outside of class a minimum of three times a week. I practised every day. If anything I worked too hard, I should have relaxed more, but I started later in life. I was 29 when I began.<\/p>\n<p>So I don&#x27;t audition for acceptance, and I don&#x27;t care about previous training or experience. Quite often in a beginning class we&#x27;ll have people who have never acted in their lives sitting right next to somebody with extensive training. It doesn&#x27;t matter. You&#x27;re all going to start at the very beginning of this brick-by-brick process. In fact, some of the people with a lot of training can be a little difficult for a while. It doesn&#x27;t mean what they&#x27;ve learned has no value, or that I&#x27;m invalidating their previous teachers. Not at all. Sandy used to say, &quot;Whatever works, you use it.&quot; But if you&#x27;re going to go on this journey, leave all that outside the classroom for now. Let us put this foundation in place. When we&#x27;re done, you decide what works for you.<\/p>\n<p>That was one of the many great things about Sandy: his lack of dictatorship. He didn&#x27;t have a myopic approach that this is the only way to work. He felt strongly that his way had value, but he also saw it wasn&#x27;t for everybody.<\/p>\n<p>I have a soft spot in my heart for people who&#x27;ve never had any training. When I started with Sanford Meisner, he had a three-year wait list. I wrote him a letter, pouring my heart out. It was basically an eight-page handwritten vomit of how I&#x27;d crawl through glass to figure out what I was put on this Earth to do, and I believed it was to have a voice and tell stories, to have this platform, this pulpit, this opportunity called theatre and film. It resonated enough with Sandy that he had somebody reach out and schedule a meeting. Three weeks after first beginning my career, I&#x27;m sitting in front of Sanford Meisner, 29 years of age, no training, no experience, never acted in my entire life. That turned out to be one of my great strengths, because I was wide open. I was a blank canvas. I didn&#x27;t have a lot of bad habits.<\/p>\n<p>In the US there&#x27;s a lot of community theatre, and it&#x27;s a wonderful thing, it lets a lot of people have fun and play. But people who grew up in community theatre can often pick up a lot of bad habits. The colleges are well known for this too. There are wonderful programmes, but you can also pick up a lot of theatrical habits, big and put-on, because you don&#x27;t have much craft, you&#x27;re being over-directed, basically marionette puppets: do this, say it this way, a lot of line readings, fake crying. This approach is the opposite of that.<\/p>\n<p>You&#x27;ve got to earn the right to speak those words. We don&#x27;t play characters, we earn them, and that takes time. Because I was a blank canvas, I didn&#x27;t have a lot of prejudices that Sandy had to cut through to get to my foundation. One of my favourites: I&#x27;d do really good work in class from time to time, and Sandy would go, &quot;Who else have you studied with besides me?&quot; And I&#x27;d say, &quot;No one.&quot; And he&#x27;d turn around, smile, and go, &quot;That&#x27;s right.&quot; That was a little bit of him puffing his chest out, but it also spoke to how purely the foundation can be put in place when you don&#x27;t have a lot to work through.<\/p>\n<p>As far as practising outside of class, whoever&#x27;s teaching you that you shouldn&#x27;t be practising the repetition, I guess the logic would be that you might be doing it wrong, and that should be corrected in class. But if they&#x27;re doing it wrong, give them the teaching about why, and then send them to practise, to grow into what you just taught. Sandy once said this great thing: &quot;Some of you are under the misconception that you&#x27;re here to work,&quot; meaning in class. He goes, &quot;That&#x27;s a falsehood. You&#x27;re here to show me the fruits of your work.&quot; Meaning, what have you been practising since I last saw you? What are your questions? What have you gotten better at? The practice between the classes is critical.<\/p>\n<p>Was I any good at the repetition when I was first learning it? Gosh, no. I felt like I was on my heels the whole time. It&#x27;s sloppy, it&#x27;s bumpy, but that&#x27;s part of what technique is. It&#x27;s not needing Sandy, not needing your teacher. Technique, he once said, is knowing how to fix it when it&#x27;s not working, and not needing me. There it is. You should be flying that plane.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> That&#x27;s what I heard as well, both sides of the story. Some teachers say, either for marketing reasons or because of the specificity of their approach, that it cannot be practised safely or usefully outside of class. I also heard that&#x27;s a wrong idea, that the class is more of a supervision of what you&#x27;ve done, in terms of being autonomous and independent in the technique, because in the end you have to own the technique for your professional life. You need to not rely on the class too much if you want to do that successfully.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Yes, yes, yes.<\/p>\n<h2>The repetition exercise and the full technique (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=720\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">12:00<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> I must ask you later about some of the exercises and the rules. Even for the repetition, the first basic exercise, some people teach the Meisner technique as if it were only the repetition, almost like a warm-up to be spontaneous.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> People think the Meisner technique is the repetition exercise. Nothing infuriated Sandy more. Those of you who really know the technique know that the repetition is the beginning, the foundation on which it all rests: to get out of your head and work from your gut, not act, be present, be wide open to what exists and not what you want to create. Do what you&#x27;re made to do, not what you want to do, Sandy would say over and over. That&#x27;s the foundation, but the Meisner technique is so much more than the repetition exercise.<\/p>\n<p>So you&#x27;ll hear people say, &quot;Yeah, I did Meisner, I didn&#x27;t like it,&quot; and I always think, well, who&#x27;d you learn it from, and what were their qualifications to even teach this information? The repetition itself is supposed to be a means to an end. By the end, even into second year, the basic repetition has grown so much that now the goal is that you&#x27;re working in that same spontaneous, organic, moment-to-moment way with somebody else&#x27;s words, taking scripted material and being just as present.<\/p>\n<p>People who come to me with previous Meisner training, what that typically means is they&#x27;ve done some repetition, and about 90 to 95 percent of the time, what they were taught in terms of just the basic foundation is wobbly. It&#x27;s not clean. It&#x27;s close, some are closer than others. There are people out there who spent a long time with Sandy and had fallings-out with him, because Sandy didn&#x27;t feel they were teaching the technique in the purity he wanted anymore. They&#x27;d made their own changes. He&#x27;d say, you&#x27;re free to do that, but don&#x27;t call it the Meisner technique. You&#x27;re teaching your version, your interpretation, which is fine, but that&#x27;s not what I teach.<\/p>\n<p>I&#x27;m not here impersonating Sandy, I&#x27;m not trying to imitate him, but I&#x27;ve got over 2,000 hours of class time, fifteen notebooks filled, and three teaching syllabuses of his teachings. That&#x27;s what I teach off of. It&#x27;s not just pulling from the book and little pithy quotes. I&#x27;m able to say, here&#x27;s where we are, here are Sandy&#x27;s words that day on this teaching, this is what it means, this is what he meant.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> It&#x27;s also in the books. They talk about the dilution of the technique, and the fact that the early exercises are easy to teach, or seem easy to teach. Many teachers claim to be Meisner teachers and then completely change the work. The worst part for me, when I was studying with many different schools, was that they were teaching sometimes completely different things, completely different types of repetitions. Sometimes they adapt it out of a lack of knowledge, they don&#x27;t know the full technique, and then make choices to expand on it, the way Meisner himself did with Stanislavski&#x27;s work, trying to get to the true Stanislavski before creating his own thing. Most people who adapt it, 90 to 99 percent of the time, just don&#x27;t know much about it, and they feel there&#x27;s potential in those exercises and go in completely different directions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> It&#x27;s true of any great teacher. Sandy said, every time the rent&#x27;s due there&#x27;s a thousand actors who run around and call themselves acting teachers, and he said, I can&#x27;t tell you how many claim to have studied with me. Just because you studied with me doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re qualified to teach. And boy did I experience that. The difference between being a student in Sandy&#x27;s class, going through the training, and then being mentored by him as a teacher, being able to ask much more intelligent questions, getting detail and specifics about why this and why that, is dramatic.<\/p>\n<p>When the pandemic hit, there&#x27;s a teacher in LA teaching Meisner who&#x27;s quite successful. She reached out to see if I&#x27;d be willing to help run her school. She never studied with Sandy. She studied with somebody who was a teacher of Sandy&#x27;s, and Sandy and that teacher had a falling-out. She&#x27;s built a very successful school. When we started talking about the technique, she asked how I teach it, what the order is. As I shared the basics and asked her in return, at one point she was saying things I&#x27;d never even heard of. She was naming exercises I&#x27;d never heard of, that made no sense to me. All I can tell you is that Sandy was my teacher, he taught me as a student and to carry it on, and I&#x27;d never heard of these things. When I hung up, I was like, wow, there it is, we&#x27;re speaking different languages. Is there some commonality? Of course. Does she mean well? Yes. Does she think she&#x27;s teaching the Meisner technique? Yes. Is she? No.<\/p>\n<p>It&#x27;s like the telephone game. You say something into someone&#x27;s ear, and 30 people later it&#x27;s diluted. That can&#x27;t be a surprise. The closer you are to the source. Prior to the internet, this is funny. I was teaching in Hawaii about 27 years ago when the internet had just begun, and a year or two in, I started getting emails from people around the world, from Europe, the UK, Australia: my teacher teaches the Meisner technique, he or she claims this, is this true? These people were making claims, at the exact same time I was there, that they&#x27;d studied with Sandy, or that they&#x27;d studied with Sandy after he stopped teaching. I&#x27;d never heard of them. So I&#x27;d say, look, if somebody tells you they teach the Meisner technique, ask them: did you study with Sandy? And if so, how long, and did you go through the formal training, the entire training? You can verify these things. Early on it was the wild west, before people realised others could find out about them. And by the way, I&#x27;m thinking of two people in particular, things got cleaned up quick once I kept saying, I&#x27;ve never heard of this person, and I was there during the exact time, and Sandy had stopped teaching by then, so that&#x27;s not true.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> To my knowledge, his reluctance to document his work, because he didn&#x27;t want it set in stone or compromised, led to a lack of promotion of the technique compared to the Strasberg method, and also to the ability of people to claim different things without really knowing the things. Which is why now, with the internet and these interviews, I feel it&#x27;s important to get some clarity. Acting is one of the few fields where, unlike music or dance or martial arts, you can learn completely different things under the same name. With the Meisner technique it&#x27;s such a difference, it&#x27;s like not even the same thing, and it&#x27;s confusing for students, regardless of how healthy or competent the teacher is. So I think it&#x27;s important to get clear on the function of these exercises historically.<\/p>\n<h2>The politics of the Meisner schools (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=1383\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">23:03<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Without overly talking about people or giving names, how would you describe, and why would you say, there is such a political game going on with the different schools of Meisner?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> I think it has to do with lack, with trying to build something. Over the years I&#x27;ve had people take potshots at me and my qualifications to teach, because when I studied with Sandy he was no longer at the Neighborhood Playhouse. He didn&#x27;t have a space, he&#x27;d moved to Los Angeles. We were his first class in LA. I began teaching for Sandy in my first year, my second, my third session. I was mentoring the next group behind us: &quot;Go call Jimmy Jarrett.&quot; I wasn&#x27;t a teacher yet, I just knew what I was doing enough to help the babies with basic repetition. As it evolved, and now as I&#x27;m mentoring with Sandy, my apprenticeship was more private. I&#x27;d sit in on classes, but I&#x27;d also spend so much time with him one-on-one, talking both as an actor and as a teacher in training. It wasn&#x27;t like the old days at the Neighborhood Playhouse where you showed up every day. It was a different apprenticeship, from 1987 to 1991, two years as a student and two more working privately as an assistant, a teacher in training.<\/p>\n<p>The last conversation I ever had with Sandy, I promised him I wanted to establish my career first and foremost as an actor. I didn&#x27;t even want to teach. He told me, you&#x27;ll have no choice. I said why. He said, because you care too much. You care so much about being an actor, about what&#x27;s possible, about the purity of it. And I knew that was true. I used to fight teaching, even though I love doing it. I toured a lot, I had shows that became very successful. I always consider myself one of the most successful actors you&#x27;ll ever meet, even though you don&#x27;t recognise me and I&#x27;m not rich and famous. I&#x27;ve made my career doing theatre, travelling all over the world for 30 years, which is almost impossible. I taught along the way, I had my school in Hawaii and one in Sun Valley, but I hadn&#x27;t established a permanent home. About 15 years ago I decided to sacrifice the acting to build this up, to establish this school in his name.<\/p>\n<p>As far as why all the politics, I think it comes from lack. Up here in the Bay Area there aren&#x27;t as many acting teachers, a couple of Meisner programmes. When I say I don&#x27;t feel I have competition, I don&#x27;t mean that in a demeaning way. I don&#x27;t know anything about these other people, it&#x27;s not even in my world. I know exactly who I am in terms of Sandy, that relationship, that lineage, and what I&#x27;m dedicated to. I&#x27;m not competing against anybody. Down in LA, there&#x27;s an acting teacher on every corner, and a lot of people want to have authority, especially in a market where others are fighting for respect, position, notoriety. They&#x27;ll make claims, or be so competitive and almost mean-spirited, like there&#x27;s not enough. It&#x27;s probably true of any business, but it&#x27;s true in this profession for sure.<\/p>\n<p>But check this out, this is interesting: the most respected, legitimate Meisner teachers on the planet, I&#x27;m close with. We&#x27;ve been close forever. They know who I am, I know who they are, they were ahead of me, and they&#x27;ve been gracious to me for those same reasons. There&#x27;s no competition. When I go teach there, or they come up, it&#x27;s reciprocal. There&#x27;s no ego, there&#x27;s a fraternity of people who earned their chair honestly.<\/p>\n<h2>Legitimate teachers and schools according to Jim Jarrett: Octave Karalievitch, Bill Alderson and Bob Carnegie (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=1736\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">28:56<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Would you like to give a few names of people or schools you think are legitimate? As we talked about last time, there was a book that came out recently, co-written with James Carville, listing a bunch of teachers, and I&#x27;ve heard that many people are not in that book and think it&#x27;s biased in some ways.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> First of all, I&#x27;m not flattering you, I think your school is legitimate. I know you didn&#x27;t study with Sandy, but I know you care. I&#x27;ve followed you and watched you from a distance for a long time, I know people who know you, and you walk with great sincerity and integrity. You want to present this as legitimately and cleanly as possible. So that, to me, counts.<\/p>\n<p>I&#x27;m going to leave out a bunch around the planet, I can only share what I know. In Los Angeles, Bill Alderson, who was with Sandy for 25 years: the William Alderson Studio. Bill&#x27;s getting up in age now, and with covid I don&#x27;t even know if his school will survive. But prior to covid, Bill had been running the William Alderson Studio in LA for 30-plus years. He was in Jon Voight&#x27;s class, and he spent 25 years assisting under Sandy in New York at the Playhouse.<\/p>\n<p>The next would be Bob Carnegie, of Playhouse West. When Sandy first moved to Los Angeles, Bob opened up his studio. He ran it with Jeff Goldblum at the time, but Jeff was blowing up as an actor and was hardly around, no criticism, he was just busy. So Bob took over the reins and drove that school to what it&#x27;s become. They take a different approach, just as a business model. You&#x27;re not part of a class that goes on a two-year journey, you show up and join a class that&#x27;s already going. This is very common around the planet, it&#x27;s a way to keep things moving and attract a lot of students. My classes are all full, even with covid, you can&#x27;t study with me until September, we&#x27;re interviewing for September now. Most places aren&#x27;t like that, nor would they want to be. I&#x27;m very blessed, I make my living as an actor, I teach because I love it, not for a dollar bill, and that allows me to continue the purity of this lineage the way Sandy wanted.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#x27;t mean those people teach for a dollar bill. They&#x27;ve just chosen, in a market saturated with actors, to have a different policy: a beginning, an intermediate, and an advanced class, where you can miss class. With Sandy you could never miss class, you couldn&#x27;t be late, ever, and that&#x27;s our policy here too. In a lot of these legitimate places I&#x27;m describing, you could miss class for a month and come back. It&#x27;s a different approach, but I list them because I know who they are and I know their qualifications to teach.<\/p>\n<h2>Sanford Meisner&#x27;s history, and James Carville (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=1950\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">32:30<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Let me give you a little history. Sandy was married twice. His second wife broke his heart, devastated him, and he basically said, screw it, I&#x27;m done with relationships. Eventually a man named James Carville, &quot;Jimmy,&quot; who was a student of Sandy&#x27;s in the 60s, became his friend, and then his partner. That&#x27;s who Sandy&#x27;s partner was for the next 30-plus years of his life.<\/p>\n<p>I&#x27;m just going to say it. You&#x27;ve seen relationships where one partner can be very jealous and protective, and that was Jimmy. The teachers I mentioned, Bob Carnegie, Bill Alderson, and others like Jon Voight, would say they don&#x27;t even go around Sandy anymore because of Jimmy. Sandy once said to me, where did everybody go? He started rattling off names. I told him, Sandy, he makes it hard for me to come to the house, he&#x27;s a gatekeeper. In my opinion Jimmy had a lot of insecurity and ego, God bless him, living in this big man&#x27;s shadow. But I want to be clear: Jimmy had dedicated his life to Sandy, supporting him from behind the scenes, running the logistics and the bills so Sandy could just teach. He was a great asset, and when Sandy&#x27;s health was failing, Jimmy was there to take care of him.<\/p>\n<p>As Sandy got closer to the end, the source of income was ending. There was no retirement plan. Sandy taught until he couldn&#x27;t speak another breath, he was never retiring, but when he stopped teaching, the income stopped. So Jimmy, seeing that coming, opened the James Carville Sanford Meisner School of Acting in Los Angeles. A year before that, Sandy had asked me to head up a vision: he wanted to create a place for his LA graduates to keep working and growing, similar to the concept of the Actors Studio, a place for his alumni to stay in game shape in Hollywood, and to keep the programme going. At that meeting were Bob Carnegie and myself. Bob said he couldn&#x27;t help, he had his own school to run, it would be a conflict. And I said, Sandy, I don&#x27;t want to do that. I know I&#x27;ll teach someday, but I&#x27;m 31, 32 years old, I want to be an actor. In that moment, Jimmy was not thrilled, because they were positive I&#x27;d say yes.<\/p>\n<h2>The Sanford Meisner Center (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=2160\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36:00<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p>Eventually they found somebody else, and that became the Sanford Meisner Center. They went to New York and found someone willing to come out and take the position. I don&#x27;t know what the contract or the agreement was. After Sandy passed, that arrangement blew up, and Jimmy pulled his support and lent it to another teacher, ironically someone who&#x27;d assisted under that man.<\/p>\n<h2>Martin Barter and Alex Taylor (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=2204\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">36:44<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> It&#x27;s Martin Barter, right?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Martin is the man they found in New York to come out and do this. I&#x27;ve never met him, though our paths have surely crossed, and I&#x27;m sure he&#x27;s a fine man and teacher. He&#x27;d already been teaching back East when they found him, they plugged him in, and he built that up. I don&#x27;t even know what it&#x27;s doing these days. One of his assistants, who I think was assisting under him, his name was Alex Taylor, had a falling-out with him, and when that happened, he established a school, and Jimmy went to him and threw his support behind him. Alex was marketing himself as the only teacher in the world with the blessing of the Meisner estate, and that was a way for Jimmy to keep getting a source of income.<\/p>\n<h2>Scott Trost and the &quot;Meisner Institute&quot; (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=2325\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">38:45<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p>Now there&#x27;s somebody teaching, and I don&#x27;t know all the details, who&#x27;s giving Meisner teaching certificates online. I don&#x27;t know how the classes work, but basically you can get certified to teach the Meisner technique. This person never studied with Sandy, he studied with teachers of teachers who did. His legitimacy is that he helped Jimmy Carville write his book. The book is really Jimmy&#x27;s story of him and Sandy and their adopted son, their journey. This man helped write it. His name is Scott (Trost), I don&#x27;t know how to pronounce his last name. Now the Meisner estate supports this programme of teaching certificates. I&#x27;m sure Scott&#x27;s a nice guy, I&#x27;ve heard his name over the years from the Playhouse (West). But in terms of giving teaching certificates online, just consider the source. I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s some horrible thing. Just ask Scott, did you study with Sandy, what are your qualifications to offer teaching certificates? If you like that answer, go for it.<\/p>\n<p>This is how political it gets. Not only did Jimmy not care for me because of how close I was with Sandy, but the turning point was when I opened my play about Sandy, &quot;Meisner.&quot; When Jimmy found out, he lost his mind. He called from the West Indies threatening to sue me. I&#x27;d already done all my due diligence, I knew Jimmy was coming, I had everything legally buttoned down. On the phone I offered to honour him and Sandy&#x27;s legacy, to give him a percentage every time I perform the show. When I first opened it in LA, I gave all proceeds from a three-week run to Jimmy, handed him a check, trying to get him not to be so divisive. He took the check, but that was it, we never spoke again. When he published his book, he made a list in the back of the legitimate teachers of the Meisner technique who studied with Sandy. I&#x27;m not on that list. I&#x27;m not even on the list of students who aren&#x27;t fully legitimate but are teaching the technique. I knew why when that book came out. So Jimmy and I had a falling-out years ago, but so had most everybody, that&#x27;s the point. This is my version of events, but I&#x27;m being as honest as I can, and it can be verified by a bunch of people, those same teachers who were so close with Sandy that they became ostracised in that world too.<\/p>\n<h2>Jim Jarrett&#x27;s play &quot;Meisner&quot; (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=2364\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">39:24<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Can we talk a little about your play? We were supposed to have you tour it in Paris. I&#x27;ve heard from many people that it was amazing, inspiring, and very true to Sandy, and you told me it might be made into a film, which I think is a great idea.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Sure. It&#x27;s funny, even on my playbill I don&#x27;t write &quot;written by Jim Jarrett.&quot; I didn&#x27;t write it, Sandy wrote it, Sandy dictated it. I somehow got to be with Sandy at the end of his life, when he spoke so poorly. I was a horrible student my whole educational career, I never took notes in grade school, high school, or college, and all of a sudden I&#x27;m in Sandy&#x27;s class writing down everything he says, from two years as a student and two years assisting and mentoring. It&#x27;s from these fifteen notebooks that I created the show.<\/p>\n<p>The epiphany: I was already touring a one-man show on Vincent van Gogh, authored by Leonard Nimoy, which had blown up in the most positive way. About three or four years into that tour, I&#x27;m in Manila, asked to give the keynote speech at the international theatre festival, a packed hall of about 1,500 people. They wanted me to talk about Sanford Meisner, just about Sandy, not the technique. I wondered if they&#x27;d even know who he was, because, like you said, he didn&#x27;t market himself. Lee Strasberg was a great marketer, he had a publicist and an agent, that&#x27;s not a criticism, it&#x27;s good marketing. Sandy died in a crappy little house in the Valley. He didn&#x27;t teach for a dollar bill, there were only 20 students in his class, while there were several hundred in others, where you had to audit for months and pay a ton of money.<\/p>\n<p>I got up and told stories about Sandy for half an hour, about what he stood for, how he believed that to be an actor was a noble profession, that what we do matters, that the more truthful and believable your work, the more it impacts the audience, because you can&#x27;t fake real, you can&#x27;t fake truth. I finished, and it was like a church revival. There was a line almost out the door of people who just wanted to ask more about Sandy, captivated by him. In that moment I thought, oh my God, this is going to be my next show. On the 17-hour flight home I started creating it from my notes.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#x27;t want it to be &quot;the Meisner technique,&quot; I called it &quot;Meisner,&quot; because I wanted to bring it to people who weren&#x27;t Meisner-trained, who&#x27;d only got a sound bite that he was horrible or great. I wanted you to bring your partner, your mum, your best friend, and have them go, &quot;Oh my God, I get it.&quot; It&#x27;s not about technique, it&#x27;s about a great teacher who changed your life forever through his passion, his integrity, his challenge for you to step into your brilliance.<\/p>\n<p>Because I&#x27;d transcribed all my notes, I could take a sentence from this day, a paragraph from that day, two and a half pages from another. When I first did the show it was almost four hours. I took 2,000 hours of his brilliance and condensed it into a two-hour experience of what it was like to be a student of Sandy&#x27;s, with the technique stripped away. We created a way for Sandy to interact with students. There are six couples I, as Sandy, interact with over the course of the evening, because those exchanges were so powerful. One of my favourites: a girl quits in class, as Sandy is working with her, pounding on her, not in a horrible way, trying to get her to open up. She starts crying, he thinks it&#x27;s a breakthrough, and she looks up and says, &quot;Sandy, I can&#x27;t do this anymore.&quot; We&#x27;ve recreated that with a brilliant actress, and it&#x27;s magical how it happens.<\/p>\n<p>I studied with Sandy near the end of his life, when his voice and physical capabilities were compromised, except this, his mind, which was as sharp as ever. But I couldn&#x27;t do an entire show as old Sandy, it would be too slow. So the first act is set in the 1950s, Sandy at 55, and the second act in 1985, Sandy at 85. In the second act you experience what a warrior he was, how hard it was for him, and how he was more of a purist than ever. The second act really melts your heart. When I shared it with his alumni from those eras, Sydney Pollack, Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight, Mark Rydell, I asked, am I close, is it accurate? The first time I performed it for Bill Alderson in LA, he came back at intermission and said, don&#x27;t change a thing, it&#x27;s perfect. When I do the show for actors, in New York, LA, or any strong market, it has the same response: incredibly impactful and inspiring. Again, I didn&#x27;t write it, I just did my best to shape his brilliance.<\/p>\n<h2>What is the Meisner technique? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=3108\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">51:48<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> It&#x27;s very interesting to have this idea of interacting with students in your show, because the technique itself is based on interactions. How would you describe the Meisner technique to someone, an actor&#x27;s mum, a husband or wife, someone with clich\u00e9d ideas about acting, that it&#x27;s being emotional, or speaking loudly?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> The Meisner technique is all about not acting. It&#x27;s all about truth, getting out of your head and working from your gut, becoming the most moment-to-moment, organic, instinctive, improvisational, free, liberated, healthy machine. There&#x27;s a perception of actors. If you say in public, with pride, &quot;I&#x27;m an actor,&quot; people don&#x27;t know what to do with it. &quot;Oh, are you method?&quot; Sandy used to say, there are 250,000 completely different method acting teachers in this city alone, all with their own misinterpretation of what the original method was, and then they run around saying they teach &quot;the method&quot; like it has some cohesive meaning. It&#x27;s been so watered down and diluted. People think that if you go live the part, you&#x27;re in the training. It&#x27;s about learning to transform beyond your natural self, not to play a character but to earn it.<\/p>\n<p>To a layperson, most people think actors are just really good bullshitters. Unfortunately that&#x27;s true of so much acting, back to the community theatre thing. It&#x27;s like a junk-food experience. The Meisner technique is the opposite. It&#x27;s all about authenticity, falling into the most free, liberated version of you.<\/p>\n<h2>The genesis of the technique, and the dangers of method acting (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=3255\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">54:15<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> The genesis of the technique, this probably isn&#x27;t well known: Sandy once said to me, &quot;I should have been put in prison for what I taught for the first almost 10 years of my career, because I didn&#x27;t know what I was teaching.&quot; What he was taught, he knew was wrong. He knew there were things about the method that made you even more in your head, more introverted than ever. He could feel it and see it. But there was no profession of acting teacher. If you filled out your taxes in the 1930s in the US, nobody wrote &quot;acting teacher,&quot; because there were no teachers, there was no craft. There were directors, but no method. That&#x27;s what was so revolutionary about what Constantin Stanislavski brought to this country, and why people glommed onto it: finally there was possibly a way to have a good performance without just waiting for the stars to line up. But then it became an obsession, a religion, and got misinterpreted.<\/p>\n<p>I&#x27;m not bagging on the method at all, to thine own self be true, if it works for you, beautiful. But Sandy knew there were inherent problems. He was violently opposed to emotional memory. He wanted the opposite for his actors. He&#x27;d say, if it works for you, go ahead, but personally I don&#x27;t want you to have to go relive your past over and over again, I want you to heal that stuff so you&#x27;re not constantly limited by it. The tortured-artist paradigm, Sandy was violently against. He said you don&#x27;t need a screwed-up life to be an actor, in fact the more screwed up it is, the worse chance you have of sticking around, and boy is that true. He wanted us healthy. Instead of a screwed-up childhood or tormented wounds, he wanted us to heal those and to develop the most important thing for an actor: your imagination. Within a vivid imagination there&#x27;s almost no place you can&#x27;t go, and none of this is real in the first place. Hamlet isn&#x27;t real, he&#x27;d say, it&#x27;s a play, you&#x27;re supposed to play.<\/p>\n<p>So the genesis: at a party in the Hamptons, Sandy had a date he kept introducing to New York socialites. She kept asking, what&#x27;s his name, what&#x27;s his name. Finally he said, don&#x27;t you pay attention? And she said, do you? A light bulb went off. He realised, my God, nobody listens, people are horrible listeners, no wonder we don&#x27;t remember names. It seems like a good time to show up and listen is when someone&#x27;s telling you their name, and we can&#x27;t even do that, we have so much chaos going on. Then the number one fear of most people is getting up in front of others, so bad listening goes to worse. He thought, no wonder nothing believable or truthful is happening. In that moment he said, I&#x27;m going to stop trying to teach character and script interpretation, all these technical things that get people more in their head. Nothing believable will happen until I get you to show up. Even if your partner doesn&#x27;t show up, you can still show up off of nothing. It&#x27;s not as good, it&#x27;s only as strong as the weakest link, but you can&#x27;t worry about the other person.<\/p>\n<p>That was the genesis of Sandy trying to find his own way. He was a trailblazer, he didn&#x27;t have mentors at this point. It eventually became known throughout the world as the Meisner technique, though he never called it that, he just called it his class, where he&#x27;s trying to teach you to be present and truthful. He&#x27;d try this and a bit of that, and it wasn&#x27;t until the early-to-mid 1960s that everything became crystallised and solidified. He didn&#x27;t really tweak it much over the next 25 years. Certain classes he&#x27;d leave things out, he&#x27;d punish classes that weren&#x27;t working hard enough, take exercises away. People say he was constantly changing it until the very end, that&#x27;s not accurate, that wasn&#x27;t my experience. I look at my notes from when I was a student and they&#x27;re almost identical.<\/p>\n<h2>Can you teach Meisner in a book or online? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=3572\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">59:32<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> There&#x27;s so much similarity in Dennis Longwell&#x27;s book, the one with the picture of Sandy on the cover, it&#x27;s almost verbatim, because it&#x27;s from just a year or two before I started studying with him. But Longwell&#x27;s book was not a teaching syllabus, and unfortunately a lot of people treated it that way. He was a fly on the wall, a writer in the class, and tons was left out. It&#x27;s a brilliant book at capturing Sandy&#x27;s genius, but it&#x27;s not a teaching syllabus of the technique, nor was it ever intended to be. Read the preface: Sandy says he was asked so many times to write a book about the Meisner technique, tried several times, and finally gave up because he realised not only can&#x27;t it be done, it shouldn&#x27;t be done. Since then it has been, and it can help you understand some things, especially if you already have some knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>Can you learn the Meisner technique online? I get this all the time. Can you introduce some basic principles of a first session online to a group? Yes. Can you take advanced students and do some exercises via Zoom here and there? Yes, if the truth of it is that we&#x27;re having a phone call, then the phone call has to be the scenario. But can you teach the Meisner technique online by having students work moment to moment via Zoom as it grows brick by brick, or work on scenes with all the limitations of Zoom? In my opinion, no. Is it being done? Oh, yeah. One thing we are exploring is having students in front of me on a monitor, just like you are now, with proper cameras and lighting, where a qualified teacher absolutely could teach off that work. So there are exceptions. But so many people, because they can&#x27;t gather, are trying to teach the technique online to two people working moment to moment via Zoom. You can do it, it&#x27;s being done, I&#x27;d personally never do it, and on top of that you miss the experience of the class growing together, and come second year it would be impossible, because you need your classmates for so many of the exercises.<\/p>\n<h2>Larry Silverberg, &quot;master teachers,&quot; and Nick Moseley (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=3777\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:02:57<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> I&#x27;d like to ask you about a few books. You once told me about an experience with Larry Silverberg&#x27;s series.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Here&#x27;s exactly how it went down. I&#x27;m in the Samuel French bookstore in Los Angeles, around 1991 or 1992, don&#x27;t quote me, and right at the counter there&#x27;s a book called &quot;The Meisner Technique&quot; by Larry Silverberg. I knew the Dennis Longwell book, up to that point the only one out there. I bought it, and I was ironically headed to Sandy&#x27;s that day. Jimmy opens the door, I get escorted in, and I go, &quot;Hey Sandy, who&#x27;s this?&quot; Sandy looks at it and says, &quot;Who is Larry Silverberg? I&#x27;ve never heard of him.&quot; I was the one who began the nightmare, because eventually the estate reached out and it had to be changed to &quot;the Meisner approach.&quot; I don&#x27;t know who Larry studied with, but he&#x27;s done very well writing a bunch of books about the technique.<\/p>\n<p>I love this one. I get Google Alerts about Meisner teachers worldwide, and there&#x27;s a &quot;master teacher&quot; out of New York City I&#x27;ve never heard of, who never studied with Sandy. Sandy once got called a master teacher, and I have this quote on my website: he said, if anyone ever calls himself a master teacher, run from them, that&#x27;s ego. He said, I&#x27;m a man, I haven&#x27;t mastered anything, I&#x27;m just dedicated to truth. Classic Sandy, classic humility.<\/p>\n<p>Larry&#x27;s been doing this for a good 30 years, written a lot of books. Can you learn some things, especially if you already have some information? Sure. I&#x27;ve never read them, just a little of that first one 30 years ago. I&#x27;m positive he&#x27;s a good person who means well. But I know that the way that book was sharing these teachings, Sandy was not happy with it at all, nor did he want it presented like that, especially by someone who wasn&#x27;t trained by him to teach.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> There&#x27;s also a book called &quot;Meisner in Practice,&quot; which teaches the repetition by, for example, matching the other person&#x27;s breathing pattern, trying to breathe like them as you do the exercise.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> That&#x27;s completely antagonistic. Sandy never did that. But there it is, people are going to make it their own if they choose to, and that doesn&#x27;t necessarily make it a bad thing. All I will ever do as a teacher is teach the Meisner technique exactly how Sandy wanted it presented. I&#x27;m not going to change it, or turn it into an intensive or a workshop.<\/p>\n<h2>Can you teach it in an intensive workshop? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=4043\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:07:23<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> You can do a six-week introductory class and give the basics, there&#x27;s nothing wrong with that. But there&#x27;s a teacher in the area who was teaching second-year material in a six-week course. That&#x27;s criminal. Then people go, &quot;Wow, this Meisner thing was hard, I didn&#x27;t get it, it was stupid.&quot; Yeah, you didn&#x27;t get it, you got a cobbled, bastardised version. There&#x27;s a reason it&#x27;s supposed to be presented this way. Our students who go through the training will tell you that as it builds and grows, you start appreciating Sandy&#x27;s genius on a whole other level. You realise why this had to happen before that could happen. Some students are impatient, &quot;I got it, I got it,&quot; but we&#x27;re building a house on a foundation that&#x27;s rock solid. You&#x27;ve got it, but we&#x27;re going to pound those pillars in deeper, so it&#x27;s second nature, not just &quot;you got it.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>How can you train to be a teacher? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=4148\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:09:08<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> If someone out there is teaching, maybe not perfectly teaching Meisner yet, and wanted your advice on how to approach teaching a class, what would you say? What&#x27;s your mindset, your goals, your point of view on the students?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> If you&#x27;ve got someone teaching who has some understanding, I get this all the time, people reaching out from all over the world: I studied with somebody who studied with somebody who may have studied with Sandy, and I care, I want to do this better. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m invited to talk to students and run workshops with faculty at universities. With covid it&#x27;s more via Zoom now. I also offer, and will create more opportunities for, students and teachers around the world to mentor under me responsibly, in a way that actually benefits you.<\/p>\n<p>My advice, and this isn&#x27;t an infomercial: if you&#x27;re a teacher and you want to be better, do what you&#x27;re doing. You&#x27;ve been a beautiful example, you&#x27;ve reached out to the more legitimate people in this world for years, trying to get clarity. Because of your sincerity. I&#x27;ve had people do this who are just takers, very self-serving, ego-driven, and I&#x27;ll cut it short, I&#x27;m too busy, there are too many others who are open, healthy, humble, sincere. If your teacher has ego in any way, that&#x27;s a red flag. Sandy could be tough, but he said, the only ego I have goes into trying to teach you to the best of my ability. It wasn&#x27;t about him, it was about truth, and he didn&#x27;t care who did it. If you were being casual, trying to get it at too cheap a price, he had no time for that. That&#x27;s not ego, that&#x27;s standards, that&#x27;s respect. I feel the same, especially the older I get. You can&#x27;t buy your chair at my school, you&#x27;ve got to earn it, and by earn it I just mean work hard, be open, humble, teachable.<\/p>\n<p>So if there are teachers listening, reach out to anybody you respect, who you feel is legitimate, get clarification, buy the books. But there&#x27;s so much out there from people positioning themselves. If people tell you they studied with Sandy, do a little checklist: what years, for how long, did you complete the training, were you trained to teach? These days that list has dwindled to maybe four on the planet who were trained by him as a student, trained as a teacher, and have Sandy&#x27;s blessing, not Jimmy Carville&#x27;s, Sandy&#x27;s blessing, to teach. It&#x27;s a short list. And there&#x27;s a whole new wave of people who studied with those teachers. The Scott I mentioned, he&#x27;s aligned with the Meisner estate, which gives it extra credibility and validation, but I&#x27;m one thousand percent positive he never studied with Sandy. Does that make him a bad teacher? Of course not. Just trust your gut, but do your vetting, because there&#x27;s a lot of misinformation and you don&#x27;t know the whole story.<\/p>\n<h2>Historical dates (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=4445\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:14:05<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Do you have the dates in mind, when Meisner stopped teaching?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> He stopped teaching fully in 1993. Really in 1992 is when his health fell down. He couldn&#x27;t get the volume even with the speaker, he was so tired and ravaged, so he&#x27;d cancel classes or cut them short. Jimmy tried to sit in, but he had to take care of Sandy at home. Even when I was studying with him, 1987 to 1989, there were stretches of several weeks without class because his health was struggling, but he always snapped back better than before. By 1991 you could see him slowing down, by 1992 it was clear he probably should have quit, not to discredit him, his mind was fine, it was his ability to communicate that had diminished. By 1993 he never taught again. He passed on February 2nd, 1997.<\/p>\n<h2>Pure Meisner or adapting the technique (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=4525\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:15:25<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> I think you are one of the purest teachers of this amazing technique, meaning you teach it the way he taught it. I&#x27;m not a purist myself in that sense. I feel everyone claiming to teach Meisner should research and study it completely, especially if they&#x27;re going to use his name, but I think, like any technique, it&#x27;s whatever works for the actor, and we discover new things, it can be improved. Do you think the Meisner technique can be improved? Is there anything you bring in, from your personality or your way of teaching, that you&#x27;ve found valuable for the students?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> I love your question. Every time I teach, I&#x27;m bringing me in, I&#x27;m doing my best. I&#x27;ll read Sandy&#x27;s words, his teachings on this new brick, and then I&#x27;ll close the book and go, all right, questions. The confusion of this, what did that mean, and I&#x27;ll do my best to break it down and make it more accessible. I&#x27;ll show film clips, not just of Meisner actors but of people doing their work strongly and truthfully, because just as you can teach off false moments, you can teach off true ones. But sometimes almost to a fault, I am such a purist. He put the foundation to my dream in place. I came to him a 29-year-old kid with a broken heart, and this artistic genius changed my life forever for the good.<\/p>\n<p>Somebody once asked me, aren&#x27;t you concerned you&#x27;ll always be in his shadow, always known as Sanford Meisner&#x27;s last teaching prot\u00e9g\u00e9? I&#x27;m like, you say that as if it&#x27;s a bad thing. I&#x27;m good with that. If all I&#x27;m known for is being the guy who did his very best to honour his teacher and the purity of these teachings, I&#x27;m good. You want to go change them, knock yourself out, you found a different way, cool, good. I&#x27;m not competing against anybody. I&#x27;m going to teach Sandy&#x27;s way exactly how he wanted it presented. And yet, of course, it&#x27;s me driving the bus, so I can&#x27;t help but bring myself into it, but I understand the material so well after all these years that I think that&#x27;s a good thing.<\/p>\n<h2>Sticking points of the technique (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=4742\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:19:02<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> As a teacher, have you noticed any specific sticking points, any part of the technique that&#x27;s particularly difficult for everyone to learn?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> One of the biggest mistakes teachers make is thinking it&#x27;s about repeating. People with previous Meisner training, where it was presented improperly, think it&#x27;s about repeating. It&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s about communicating, being wide open and affected, not mindless mechanical repetition. That should shift immediately, by the second or third class of the repetition being introduced.<\/p>\n<p>As for the difficult next bricks: every time you introduce something new, a new dimension, because again the Meisner technique isn&#x27;t the repetition exercise, it&#x27;s going to grow and expand. As soon as you add the three elements, people tend to start playing it, they violate being present and working from the gut, they start playing their urgency, playing the exercise. So that can be a hurdle. When people come to the door, they tend to want to hang onto their reason for knocking, make it about them, and that can be difficult. I always tell them, don&#x27;t compare yourself to anybody else in here. Everyone&#x27;s struggles and epiphanies happen at different times. Some sail through a section smoothly, others really struggle, one step forward, two back, be patient.<\/p>\n<p>I certainly had problems with preparation for a while, really understanding the purity of it, what Sandy wanted from it. I remember struggling with the transition where the work starts to get too conversational. Because it&#x27;s supposed to grow. When well-trained, hard-working Meisner students are doing advanced work, it should sound almost conversational, not like basic repetition. It&#x27;s not that they&#x27;re not working off the moment, they&#x27;re just so free and instinctive. You can&#x27;t do the repetition exercise out on a set, it&#x27;s supposed to be a means to an end. I struggled with that transition too, and it happens in first year.<\/p>\n<p>One of the most liberating chapters happens near the end of first year, with the fantasy exercises. Almost to a student, there are major breakthroughs there, because of the build, because of where we are as a whole together. Sandy&#x27;s genius is on full display, because the fantasy exercises tend to crack people open in the most positive way. It&#x27;s real estate they never give back, a new level of freedom, of not caring what people think, so we can get out of our head on a whole new level and just show up and be free.<\/p>\n<h2>Jack Waltzer and urgency at the door (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=5003\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:23:23<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> This reminds me of a teacher in Paris, an American who claims to teach Meisner and has testimonials from many Hollywood stars, but from what I&#x27;ve heard from many teachers, he doesn&#x27;t really teach the Meisner technique. His name is Jack Waltzer. He teaches a dozen activities, and for example he brings urgency at the door, which I&#x27;ve heard, even from people we both know, is contradictory to Meisner, that you should never have urgency at the door.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> You never have urgency at the door, ever. You can have strong, compelling reasons, but if you had urgency at the door, you&#x27;d knock and say, do you have a fire extinguisher, they say no, and you&#x27;d leave, my house is on fire, my kid&#x27;s pinned underneath the truck. You don&#x27;t have urgency at the door, ever. You have compelling reasons: you&#x27;re my best friend, I&#x27;m here to take you to rehab, I&#x27;m here to take you to your first chemo treatment because you can&#x27;t drive and you&#x27;ll be sick afterwards. Deep, compelling reasons for coming to the door, never urgency. Urgency is for the activity. The door is something different, the circumstances at the door are absolutely free.<\/p>\n<p>Many people, including this man, teach the activity in a way that brings a systematic conflict, because the activity has urgency and the door has urgency, so it&#x27;s a conflict immediately, high-stakes exercises that seem impressive but seem beside the point of the foundational work.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Initially, when the door is first introduced, there&#x27;s not a big high conflict. This needs to build, brick by brick. The people in the room shouldn&#x27;t have urgency when the door is first introduced, it&#x27;s too many balls in the air, all of a sudden people start playing a character, it&#x27;s like a skit, like an improv, instead of something organic. Because we&#x27;re so disciplined at working this way, we can take this next brick and it doesn&#x27;t sink us, but if you put too much on it, it becomes a mess.<\/p>\n<h2>Is the Meisner technique life-changing? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=5150\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:25:50<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> You talked about Meisner being life-changing for you. What impact do you think this technique can have on someone&#x27;s life and psychology? Because it seems to me that, contrary to method acting, which can be unhealthy, learning the Meisner technique can really open you up in your life.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Sandy said, the beautiful thing about teaching actors is that you are the piano, you&#x27;re the instrument. Your humanity, your sensitivity, who you are, your life experiences. With a developed imagination you can expand that to a whole new level. You&#x27;re more interesting as an actor at 25 than at 15, and you&#x27;ll be more interesting at 35, you&#x27;ve laughed more, loved more, hurt more, broken hearts and had yours broken, your well is deeper.<\/p>\n<p>The Meisner technique is about accessing that well of your humanity, all the shades and possibilities of who you are, and it&#x27;s all about authenticity. It impacts every relationship in your life, because you are the instrument, and if the training is about stepping into the most authentic, empowered, healthy version of you, how could it not? You become more healthy, grounded, empowered: I&#x27;m enough, and I&#x27;ve got something to say, and whether I impact one person or a million, I matter.<\/p>\n<p>Another dynamic: if you&#x27;re in a relationship that&#x27;s not healthy, it&#x27;s going to get exposed, because you&#x27;re going to get healthier. It&#x27;s impossible, if you&#x27;re trained properly and doing the work, not to be impacted in the most empowering ways. You&#x27;re rising up, waking up, stepping into a version of you that demands to be seen and heard, again not in an ego way. Like any relationship, you&#x27;ll grow together or apart, but this is like on steroids. And it&#x27;s not a cult. I hear of people who&#x27;ve been with a Meisner teacher for seven or eight years, and I think, oh my God. We do it just like Sandy: you come here, and as soon as it&#x27;s done, you&#x27;re gone. My job is to get you out of here, not tie you to us. We leave a studio open for graduates to keep growing into the work, but they&#x27;re not tethered to me and they&#x27;re not paying for training, they&#x27;re done.<\/p>\n<p>Getting free of what people think of you, getting rid of nerves, believing at your core that you deserve to have a voice on this planet, it&#x27;s exhilarating, it&#x27;s hard to shake off afterwards in a good way. Sandy used to say, your talent&#x27;s waiting for you right over there, it&#x27;s called freedom, and that&#x27;s what the Meisner technique is all about.<\/p>\n<h2>Can anyone learn the Meisner technique? (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=5454\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:30:54<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Do you think anyone can become an actor by learning the Meisner technique?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> Can I turn anybody into an actor? No, absolutely not. I can turn anyone who cares, who&#x27;s willing to meet me halfway, and together we put the foundation of Sandy&#x27;s genius in place. I guarantee you, when we&#x27;re done, you&#x27;ll call yourself an actor and it will truly mean something. You&#x27;ll be able to work and compete at the highest level in film, theatre, and television. There&#x27;s no prediction of a career, some of the most talented actors in history didn&#x27;t work much, and people with no business working are wildly successful. I&#x27;m not guaranteeing a career, I&#x27;m guaranteeing you&#x27;ll be able to call yourself an actor, you&#x27;ll know how to work, know how to fix it when it&#x27;s not working, and you won&#x27;t need me. I don&#x27;t care what your natural talent is on that first day, and if you work hard you&#x27;ll keep uncovering and growing into your talent.<\/p>\n<p>So many people in an acting class look around like they did in high school, at the cool kids, and go, I suck, I&#x27;m doomed. No, you&#x27;re not, this isn&#x27;t that. Some people have more natural ability and freedom out of the gate, for myriad reasons, which is why I say don&#x27;t compare your instrument to anybody else&#x27;s. The question is, are you in or not? I&#x27;m a much better actor than I was 30 years ago, better than I was a year ago. If I were defined by where I was 30 years ago, I should have quit. Through Sandy&#x27;s genius I can help anyone who wants to be an actor not only become one in terms of craft, but be able to say it with conviction: I know what I&#x27;m doing, I know how to work.<\/p>\n<h2>How to join Jim Jarrett&#x27;s class, and his online offerings (<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/2tZM_flwHLo?t=5568\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">1:32:48<\/a>)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> How should someone go about meeting you to learn, if they want to join you in September?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> It&#x27;s the Meisner Technique Studio. Just Google Jim Jarrett or the studio. We offer a lot of online teachings. A bunch of years ago I developed a series called &quot;Meisner Trained,&quot; I didn&#x27;t call it the Meisner technique, I called it Meisner Trained, just to show some teachings and exchanges. We have a lot of free YouTube videos. Students fly from all over the world to move here and study with us. We only take 20 students at a time, and there&#x27;s a wait list, I say that with appreciation and gratitude. We&#x27;re completely full at all levels, we can&#x27;t start another class until September, and we&#x27;re already interviewing.<\/p>\n<p>We&#x27;ve got some exciting things happening. We&#x27;re about to reopen the school, and during this time off I&#x27;ve been playing with a lot of ideas. One thing, which may be up by the time you view this, is that we&#x27;re going to turn the studio into a hot set: we&#x27;ll stream classes and allow people around the world to audit for a fee, of course with the students&#x27; approval, because their safety, comfort, and security come first. We&#x27;ll also offer the chance to teach me-teach-you from your own studio, to be a fly on the wall and help teach the work, but you&#x27;d need a proper studio, proper cameras and lighting, you can&#x27;t do it well with two people in a room and an iPhone. I&#x27;m available for one-on-one private coaching with teachers and actors around the world, all on our website. I always offer the first session free, just to figure out what you&#x27;re looking for and whether I can help.<\/p>\n<p>I have a newsletter I&#x27;ve been sending out every Sunday for seven years. It&#x27;s not about the Meisner technique, it&#x27;s about helping anyone be healthy about their dream. There&#x27;s nothing more common than really talented, well-trained actors who are out of work. If you can&#x27;t handle the business part, the marketing and promotion, and just as importantly the mental and emotional health part of having such an enormous dream in what&#x27;s been called the most competitive profession on the planet, your boat starts leaking. Your boat is your craft, but also your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health, because you&#x27;re the instrument, you&#x27;re the president of your dream, the director of marketing, the talent, and you&#x27;d better be the therapist too. So many actors quit not because they&#x27;re sick of acting, but because they&#x27;re sick of the struggle.<\/p>\n<p>I used to take students to Hawaii on retreat, and we&#x27;ve just done a couple of online versions back to back, which has been enormously successful. It has nothing to do with the technique and everything to do with what I&#x27;ve learned in 34 years of chasing this crazy dream, the resiliency to take a punch and come back better for it. I call it an empowered dream, and the goal is to save you a ton of time, energy, and money. All of it is on the Meisner Technique Studio site, and we&#x27;ll do a better job announcing it via social media and the newsletter, which is free, I&#x27;ve never charged for it. Some weeks I&#x27;m not sure what to write Saturday night, other weeks I&#x27;ve got content backed up, but it&#x27;s all designed to help you go after your dream in a healthier, less anxiety-filled way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Octave Karalievitch:<\/strong> Thank you, Jim, for all of this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jim Jarrett:<\/strong> I want to stress, this is the honest truth: we really only spoke recently, and it&#x27;s because of that exchange that I was excited to move forward with you. I could tell how sincere and humble you are, and how much you want to be better at all of this. And I just want to say that. I want to say it&#x27;s a pleasure, meeting you. I&#x27;ve heard about you for years, Paris Meisner Studio, about a lot of the people you&#x27;ve brought into the world over the years, wonderful people. I&#x27;ve always heard about you as well, such positive things, and now I know firsthand, I&#x27;m not being gratuitous, I really mean it. In a world where we&#x27;re trying to uphold Sandy&#x27;s legacy, integrity, standards, and purity, I&#x27;m grateful to find somebody who cares as much as I do. I know this is going to put off some people, I&#x27;m sure of that, I tried to be as honest and diplomatic and respectful as possible, but I was perfectly honest too. We can do a little series if you want, different exercises and themes, in whatever capacity moving forward, and I look forward to doing my Meisner play in that beautiful space of yours. My love and best, and thank you all for watching. There&#x27;s a website, the YouTube channel, and Instagram and Facebook as well: the Meisner Technique Studio. If you search that name, you&#x27;ll find it.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p><em>This interview was conducted by Octave Karalievitch, founder of the Paris Meisner Studio and creator of First Principles Acting.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jim Jarrett describes himself as Sanford Meisner&#x27;s last teaching prot\u00e9g\u00e9. In this long-form interview, conducted by Octave Karalievitch, he talks about what he learned directly from<span class=\"excerpt-hellip\"> [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":5252,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-en","category-transcription-podcasts-en"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.0 (Yoast SEO v22.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The truth about Meisner history: our interview with Jim Jarrett | Paris Meisner Studio<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/octavekaralievitch.com\/en\/the-truth-about-meisner-history-our-interview-with-jim-jarrett\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The truth about Meisner history: our interview with Jim Jarrett\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jim Jarrett describes himself as Sanford Meisner&#x27;s last teaching prot\u00e9g\u00e9. 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